Goodbye SEO, hello GEO. Generative Engine Optimization refers to optimizing your content and your website so that it is picked up and used by generative AI platforms. The trend is important, and apparently taking over search results – many are turning to ChatGPT (and similar tools) in place of Google Search. AI is the future, right? So SEO must be dead, long live GEO!
Except we’ve heard this logic before. It’s like every time there’s a major new tech introduced, it means search is dead and SEO with it. Because SEO is all about search (right?!) – it’s right there in the name! Allow me to remind you of the last time this played out. It was with voice search – a supposed game changer that would remake the landscape of SEO as we knew it. As early as 2016, voice search was going to kill SEO and put agencies out of business, something about how natural language searches would negate the need for keyword research and optimization. By the way, a quick search shows the same people saying the same thing in 2025
Folks, this is nonsense.
What’s true about voice search is true about GEO (I actually love the acronym), namely, that the same optimization techniques we’ve been using for years to compete in search are the exact same techniques we’ll use to compete in GEO (and voice). The reason? Google set the foundation of clean, usable search decades ago and has been building sophisticated machinery since then to improve it. Their purpose has been simple – put the best, most relevant information in front of the people looking for it. Guess what – GEO is doing the exact same thing, and just like Google, these platforms need additional technical elements to better understand the web content. Why would you not use the same infrastructure Google has created and we’ve all developed over the years?
More specifically, let’s look at a couple of the elements that go into search rankings and how they affect GEO. First and foremost: popularity. The popularity of a page is the surest way to guarantee high ranking in search. And how does an LLM work? By stringing together the most likely next word in a sentence. So as your written content gets more popular, it gets quoted, paraphrased, and outright copied in all manner of ways – thereby creating the most likely string of words for an LLM to pick up.
How about context. Ever since Google introduced Latent Symantic Indexing as a factor in its search rankings, keyword stuffing has mattered less and the context of your information has mattered more. This is arguably the best part of using a Gen AI platform – it’s ability to contextualize your exchange is fantastic and relevant in every field of work.
Look, I could go on but I think you get the point. Almost every factor in SEO, is a factor in GEO (the possible exception is meta tags). A real SEO’s job has never been about ranking #1, in fact anyone claiming that has revealed themselves as a hack. It’s always been about getting your audience to engage and making that engagement benefit your business. SEO has never been married to Google – actually most of us treat Google with suspicion at the best of times. The only reason we fixate on Google is that they lead the space. They are (still) the best in the world in parsing information and delivering it to the masses, so we look to them to understand how to make our content more relevant and easy to understand. When that stops being true, we’ll look elsewhere. That’s why, even as search results seem less relevant to more people who increasingly turn to Reddit, social media and other niche channels for answers to their questions, the job of an SEO remains as relevant as ever.
